1960-1969 · 6 entries
Smaller computers, screens you could watch in real time, and the first serious argument that a television set could be a toy.
Transistors changed who could sit at a computer. The machines built in the early 1960s were still expensive, but a new class of them was small enough to fit in a room rather than fill a building, cheap enough for a single department to own outright, and meant to be used directly by one person at a console with a screen in front of them. Waiting two days for a printout is a completely different relationship than watching something happen as you type. Once a display could refresh fast enough to show motion and a bank of switches could be read while a program was running, real-time interaction stopped being a research problem and became something students could simply do.
They did. Around university computing centers a culture formed in which writing an elaborate, useless, delightful program was a respectable way to spend the night, and the best known product of that culture was a two-player space duel with a star tugging the ships off course. Nobody sold it. It travelled instead as a courtesy copy handed from one installation to the next, partly because it made an excellent demonstration for salesmen and visitors. That distribution model was accidental but formative. It established that a game could spread on its own merits, with no packaging, no promotion and no price attached, and it gave a whole generation of engineers a shared reference point.
Commerce was moving on a separate track, and mostly outside the United States. Japanese manufacturers were building elaborate electromechanical amusements full of lights, sound and moving parts, and discovering that these exported well. A submarine game shipped abroad in the middle of the decade helped settle a quarter as the American price of a single play, which is the number every arcade designer would work against for the next twenty years. In New Hampshire, meanwhile, an engineer at a defense contractor argued in a short internal proposal that the tens of millions of television sets already installed in American homes sat idle most of the day and could be doing something interactive instead.
None of this looked like an industry yet, and the decade's wider preoccupations were elsewhere: a space program that made engineering glamorous, a television schedule that had become the country's shared culture, and a youth politics deeply suspicious of the institutions that owned all the computers. Two threads ran quietly underneath that noise. Prototypes in a contractor's laboratory proved that a household television could be turned into a playfield with fairly modest circuitry, and a research network carried its first message between two California sites. Neither was aimed at entertainment in any way. Both would be load-bearing within a decade.
The shift from batch processing to interactive use is the decade's quiet revolution. A machine you sit at, with a screen that redraws many times a second, invites a completely different kind of program than one you submit to an operator. Almost every early game came from an institution that had bought such a machine and then left curious people alone with it after hours.
The most influential game of the 1960s was given away. It moved between computer installations as a favor, a teaching aid and a sales demonstration, and no money ever changed hands. Free circulation made it a common language among engineers, several of whom would later build the first commercial machines. The pattern reappears every time a format spreads faster than anyone can charge for it.
While researchers played for free, Japanese manufacturers were proving that mechanical amusements with real showmanship could be exported and sold worldwide. Their success in American arcades helped fix a quarter as the standard price of one play. Everything about arcade design that followed, from session length to escalating difficulty, was an answer to the question of how to earn that coin again.
Ralph Baer, a division engineer at a New Hampshire defense contractor, wrote a short proposal for games played on ordinary television receivers. His management funded the work quietly, and the first home console followed.
A programmer at UCLA typed the first characters sent between two host computers on ARPANET, addressed to a machine at Stanford Research Institute. The connection failed after two letters, and the network it began carried everything afterward.
By 1970 the pieces were no longer scattered. A game existed that people would queue up to play, hardware existed that could be manufactured at a price, an amusement trade existed that knew how to collect coins from a public, and the household television had been shown capable of displaying a playfield. The 1960s did not produce an industry. It produced, in unrelated places and for unrelated reasons, all four of the things an industry was going to need.
